Learning Metaphors

Learning is a highly complex process about which we know very little. But one thing we know for sure is that people learn in different ways. How can we have a sense of the way our students learn -- just by listening to what they say? A very practical approach is to take note of the metaphors in their language.

What is a Metaphor?

In the innovative and mind-expanding book Metaphors We Live By, linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson say:

The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another. [Note 1]

We like this definition for a number of reasons. First, it recognises that metaphor is about capturing the essential nature of an experience. For instance, when a student of ours described his situation as "It's like I'm banging my head against a brick wall." the sense of the repetitive, painful and self-defeating nature of his experience was instantly apparent. Second, the definition acknowledges that metaphor is an active process which is at the very heart of understanding ourselves, others and the world about us. Third, metaphor need not be limited to verbal expressions. For us, a metaphor can include any expression or thing that is symbolic for a person, be that nonverbal behaviour, self-produced art, an item in the environment, or an imaginative representation. In other words, whatever a person says, sees, hears, feels or does, as well as what they imagine, can be used to produce, comprehend and reason through metaphor.
Metaphor is not an occasional foray into the world of figurative language, but the fundamental basis for everyday cognition. Lakoff and Johnson state:

In all aspects of life, ... we define our reality in terms of metaphors and then proceed to act on the basis of the metaphors. We draw inferences, set goals, make commitments, and execute plans, all on the basis of how we in part structure our experience, consciously and unconsciously, by means of metaphor. [Note 2]

Andrew Ortony has identified three characteristics of metaphors that account for their utility: vividness, compactness and expressibility. [Note 3] In short, metaphors carry a great deal of abstract and intangible information in a concise and memorable package.
In addition there is a fourth property, and it is the one which most impacts the way students learn. Because metaphors describe one experience in terms of another, they specify and constrain our ways of thinking about the original experience. This influences the meaning and importance we attach to the original experience, the way it fits with other experiences, and the actions we take as a result.

Clean Language

There is a very simple way to discover your student's metaphors for learning -- just ask them:

And when you're learning, that's learning like what?

Whatever answer they give can be further developed by asking:

And is there anything else about that 'X'?
And what kind of 'X' is that 'X'?

[Where X' is the metaphorical or symbolic part of the answer to the original question.]
These 'Clean' Language questions are taken from a method of exploring a person's metaphors devised by David Grove, and are fully explained in our book MetaphorsinMind: Transformation through Symbolic Modelling. [Note 4]
In the 1980s, psychotherapist David Grove realised that many of his clients naturally described their symptoms and outcomes in metaphor. He discovered that when he enquired about these metaphors using the client's exact words, their perception of their problems began to change. This led him to create Clean Language, a method of asking simple questions of clients' metaphors which neither contaminate nor distort them.

Metaphors for Learning

Using the above clean questions, we elicited a metaphor for learning from ten adult students:

1. Planting flowers -- A seed is planted in my mind which I nurture with water and sun in the faith that it will sprout and grow.
2. Playing cards -- I divide things into four categories and look for patterns across the suits until the logic and meaning emerges and I know which card to play.
3. Savings account -- I invest the time to accumulate data and information until there is enough interest that I can roll it over into the next idea.
4. Switching on a light bulb -- It's not until the light switches on that I have an insight or an 'ah ha'.
5. Eating -- You need to take in the basic meat and potatoes before you get to the mouth-watering dessert.
6. Being a detective -- It's all about uncovering the facts, looking for clues and asking the right questions until the whole mystery makes sense.
7. Peeling an onion -- I peel off a layer which reveals the next layer to be peeled off. Each time something teIls me I'm get closer to the core of the matter.
8. A quest -- I'm searching for that illusive something and every step I take brings me closer to what I need to know, but I never get there ... it's a continuous journey.
9. Sculpting -- You start with the raw material and shape it into a form that's pleasing to the eye.
10. Wrestling -- I struggle with the ideas until they're pinned down and I've captured them.

These metaphors reveal the diversity of student's symbolic representations for how they learn. They also suggest some interesting contrasts. For example the 'savings account' student steadily accumulates knowledge, whereas no learning will appear to be happening for the 'light bulb' student until the light is switched on. The 'playing cards' student presumably wants all the cards dealt so they can start looking for patterns, but giving the 'detective' student all the relevant information in advance will probably take the fun out of their investigation. The student on a 'quest' needs to discover new things at each step of their journey, while the 'planting flowers' student will want to stay with and continually tend the seed of an idea.
Although we obtained the metaphors for learning through asking Clean Language questions, students are speaking in metaphor all the time. Research shows that everyday conversation makes use of at least four metaphors per minute. [Note 5] Below are examples of metaphorical expressions which are 'hidden' or 'embedded' in language. Can you match the above ten students to the following problems with learning?

a. I've lost my way.
b. I can't digest all this information.
c. There's not enough in the bank.
d. It's got me beat.
e. Just when I think I understand, it all gets shuffled around.
f. I can't make anything out of this.
g. It makes me want to weep.
h. I'm clueless.
i. I'm wandering around in the dark.
j. We can't learn in these conditions.

It's easy to find the correspondence, isn't it? [Note 6] Why? For two reasons: first, we generally use common and well understood experiences as the metaphorical basis for complex and abstract information; and second, there is a consistency and logic to the metaphors each of us uses.
You can see that if you want to teach in a way that corresponds to the metaphors of a group of students, you will need a highly flexible approach.

Using Multiple Metaphors

One way to appeal to a wide range of learning styles is to make sure that you use a variety of metaphors. These should have as diverse a structure as possible. For instance, in addition to saying to the class "Can you figure this out?" and leaving it at that, you might also offer a few other metaphorical alternatives, such as:

Who can solve this?
See what you make of this.
What conclusions do you draw?
Who feels they can work this out?
Tell me when you get somewhere.
What can you construct out of this?
Take your time and see what emerges.
Tell me when you've come up with an answer.
Play around with the ideas and see where you get to.
Chew over the information until you've digested the ideas .
Spend some time considering this and it will all become clear.
You'll need to dig below the surface to get the nub of the issue.

In conclusion...

Metaphors embody and define the intangible and abstract, but this process inevitably constrains perceptions and actions to those which make sense within the logic of the metaphor. Metaphors are therefore both descriptive and prescriptive. As students become aware of their own metaphors for learning they can recognise how these limit or liberate them. In this way they can learn from their own learning process!
It also pays to know your own preferred metaphors because they have such an influence on the way you teach. Once you are familiar with your preferences you can begin to stretch yourself by employing new metaphors. For some students your new metaphors will say the same thing in a different way -- but other students will need to engage in a different class of mindbody processing. In addition to teaching the subject matter you will be training your students to process information via a variety of metaphors. The result will be an enhanced ability to think more creatively.


Notes:
1. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, p 5.
2. Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, p.158.
3. Andrew Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and Thought (Second edition), p. 622.
4. James Lawley and Penny Tompkins, Metaphors in Mind.
5. Susan R Robinson, Birkbeck College, University of London, 11 November 2000.
6. We pair them: a-8, b-5, c-3, d-10, e-2, f-9, g-7, h-6, i-4, j-1.

(article by  James Lawley and Penny Tompkins, pulished in The Clean Collection)

"Drama & Sailing" in Rome

The sunny weather of October second week has been the perfect climate for the third workshop of the Evalt project. The location, Lake of Bracciano, has been kissed by a bright and warm sun that facilitated all the outdoor activities of the transnational team of the project.

In Rome from 3 to 7 of October 2012, after 2 days of cultural exchange the group moved to Trevignano for the methodological practice of the workshop delivered by Tecnopras. The topic was Drama & Sailing.

The workshop combined the two activities in a continuuous base on the same educational metaphors, firstly developed by the Drama session (in the morning) and implemented afterwards by the Sailing session (in the afternoon). With the project management of Cristina Miliacca (psychologist, trainer, Tecnopras project coordinator), the training activities were delivered by Sabrina Lilli (educator, theatre director, actress), as regards Drama, and Stefano Bertoldi (trainer, sociologist, skipper), for what concerns Sailing.

Clicking HERE it is possible to download the educational materials of the workshop from Evalt website.

The initial briefing of the workshop

Dramatization of sailing metaphors

Dramatization of sailing metaphors

Sailing session

Preparing for the meeting in Rome, 3-7 October 2012

Giovanni Paolo Pannini "Capriccio panoramico di Roma con il Colosseo,l'Arco di Costantino e il Tempio di Castore e Polluce"

Canaletto "Veduta di Piazza Navona, Roma"

William Turner "Modern Rome - Campo Vaccino"

  Ettore Roesler Franz "Ponte rotto"

Meeting in Siauliai, June 2012

The third meeting of Evalt project has been held in Siauliai from 6 to 10 of June 2012. The agenda foresaw moments of discussion - in order to monitor what has been accomplished until now and to agree the next actions to take - and two workshop on expressive arts (decoupage and painting) and crafts (making soaps, bread, etc.) as tools for education of disadvantaged adults.

 The group at the opening moment of the meeting

The workshop on expressive arts: in blue jersey, the trainer

Liuda Radzeviciene (in red) and Lina Miliuniene (in black) of the Lithuanian team, coordinator of the meeting

Moments of the workshop

 Moments of the workshop

Developing the Innovative Mind

From 20 to 23 September 2012, in Coronado, CA (San Diego), Marriott Coronado Island, the 2012 EdTA Annual Conference will take place. The Educational Theatre Association (EdTA) is a national nonprofit organization (with approximately 90,000 student and professional members) whose mission is shaping lives through theatre education.

The 4Cs of creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication are the cornerstone 21st century skills that every college- and career-ready student needs to possess. A professional theatre educator has the "job" to cultivate and model these lifelong traits. To do so, he/she must be innovative, in the classroom and on the stage. In the 2012 EdTA Conference it will be explored the broad challenges that today’s theatre teacher educator must meet in order to succeed in our ever-changing world.

 

Conference 2012 will feature:

• Opening keynote speaker, Ben Cameron, known for his dynamic and compelling presentations on the value of the arts.

• Presentation of findings from the first national landscape study in more than twenty years of theatre teachers and school administrators on the state of theatre education, conducted by EdTA and Utah State University.

• Overview of the Next Generation Arts Standards Project.

• Practical workshops and educational opportunities to augment educator's skills for the classroom.

• Opportunities to network and exchange ideas with other educators. 

• Inspiration from the newest class of EdTA Hall of Fame inductees.

 

To see what else the conference has to offer or to find out more about the host city, explore the link: http://schooltheatre.org/events/edta-conference/

 

Metaskills: bringing learnt skills to life

What about Skills?

Skills are specific things we know how to do, like how to make origami, how to weave, how to paint, and so on. They are generally things you learn by doing, rather than by reading about in abstract. Sure, you can gain knowledge about them by reading general theory, but you have to actually get your hands dirty to get any level of mastery at all. The more skills you have, the more intelligent you become: the subconscious mind is always searching for patterns and analogies, and the more skills you have, the more sources there are for the subconscious mind to find these things. Thus, proficiency in one skill lends itself to solving unexpected problems, sometimes even without our being explicitly aware of it.

Metaskills are abstract skills which have to do with other skills. For example, an autodidact is a person who has the metaskill of being able to self-teach him or herself new skills without an outside teacher. A teacher is a person who has the metatalent to teach skills to others; here I speak of someone who is a teacher of a wide variety of things, not necessarily a teacher who focuses on one single topic. Teaching one single topic, like calculus, is a skill, but the ability to learn an arbitrary skill and then teach it to others, that is a meta-skill. Generalization is a metaskill where you look at a wide variety of skills and figure out the common underlying patterns. Specialization is one where you can take a skill and focus it more precisely, to get a new skill which is a special case of the broader original skill.

Skills Training and Metaskills Training

Skills training involves performing a skill over and over. As you perform a skill, your subconscious mind constantly tries to figure out how it can help you. At first, it doesn’t know how to help you at all, and you have to consciously think about every littlest detail. In time, the subconscious takes over more and more of the workload, allowing you to perform the skill with less and less conscious attention. This is sometimes referred to as muscle memory; you can do the skill without even thinking about it. To get to this point, you have to perform the skill quite a bit. Each time, it comes a little easier. Once your subconscious has completely taken over the performance of the skill, it shifts toward finding ways to optimize and improve the skill, and that’s how you evolve from a mere expert into a master.

Training a metaskill is the same. Just because a skill is meta, doesn’t make it any different from any other skill. The difference is that we don’t usually consciously train our meta-skills because most people don’t even recognize them as skills. Besides that, training a meta-talent is more difficult than training a skill, because you can’t as easily fall into a pattern of repetition. Whereas you can do basketball training by throwing a basketball through a hoop a whole lot of times, you can’t, for example, teach yourself calculus a whole lot of times. In order to train the meta ability of being an autodidact, you must consciously seek out new things to teach yourself. If mastering chess requires playing ten thousand games, then mastering autodidacticism requires teaching yourself ten thousand different skills.

The benefit of mastering a skill is that you get to use that one skill. It makes a contribution to your overall intelligence by giving you that much more referential material from which to draw patterns and analogies. By learning Japanese, I’ve gained the ability to talk to Japanese people in their native tongue. The benefit of mastering a metaskill is that you can get new regular skills more easily, or make better use of the regular skills you already have. When you train a skill, you are making a long term investment; when you train a meta-skill, you are making a “long long term” investment. You’re making an investment into your ability to make or profit from other long term investments.

The Reflexive Nature of Metaskills

The great thing about a meta-skill is that it’s reflexive. It’s something you apply to skills; but it is a skill, therefore, you can apply it to itself. For example, consider a master teacher who can skilfully teach every skill she possesses: in particular, she can teach how to teach. A master autodidact can, in principle, teach himself any skill: in particular, he can teach himself any metaskill. (In a very real sense, master autodidacts are like gods. They can do basically anything. I consider myself something of an intermediate level autodidact.)

Here’s another example of a metaskill. Skills analysis is the ability to take any skills you know, and break them down, analyzing them and figuring out exactly how they work. For different skills, it requires a different mastery of skills analysis to break them down. For example, just about anyone can analyze the “skill” of flipping coins. But it would take a very good skills analyst to analyze the skill of playing the harp. Skills analysis is itself just another skill, so in theory, a good enough skills analyst could break it down and analyze it.

The novel “Cheaper By The Dozen” tells the tale of the family of Frank Gilbreth, a self-described “Efficiency Expert”. He devoted his life to finding ways to make various tasks more efficient. He even invented a general system of “therbligs”, small undecomposable units of work, for analyzing general tasks. In fact, he was pioneering the “time and motion study” metaskill, which takes skills and finds ways to make them more efficient. What if someone was so good at time and motion study that they could apply it to itself, and find ways to make time and motion study itself more efficient? Then they could apply it to itself more efficiently, and make it even more efficient, and so on. How efficient could it get?

The Continuum Between Skills and Metaskills

I’ve actually been speaking of just “skills” and “meta skills” to simplify the discussion. There’s actually an entire continuous spectrum between the two. Take computer programming, for example. Programming computer games in Java is a specific skill. Programming arbitrary java applets is a slightly more meta skill, which includes the ability to program games, if you’re so inclined. Being able to program websites in arbitrary languages, learning the languages as you need ‘em, is a more meta skill. Going even more meta, you have the skill of programming any program, not just websites, in any language, learning the languages as you go.

One way to train a metaskill is to figure out the spectrum below it, and start low on the spectrum and work your way up. For example, if you want to learn to be a master teacher, you might start by simply learning how to teach your favorite subject, say, singing. Once you’re good at teaching people how to sing, you might generalize it to teaching people performance art in general. And from there, it’s not as big a jump to teaching people any arbitrary skill that you yourself possess. The master of a meta-ability probably got that way by applying the technique “by accident”, without actually being consciously aware of what was going on.

(published with kind permission of the Author, Sam Alexander, www.xamuel.com)

Break the chains

This is the second short movie shot in Istanbul during the 1st workshop of the EVALT projects and produced by the participating educators (acting, direction, shooting, editing): Time of crisis.

Topic: problems can be overcome when the person reacts proactively and changes his/her own mental and behavioral stereotypes that reduce the possibility to grow.

Synopsis: a teacher has lost his job and is in a depressive mood. Everything is black and there are no future perspectives in his mind. But he has the strength to react and expresses publicly his will to go beyond the crisis.

Galatasaray Hamam

During the workshop held in Istanbul in March this year, the participants - all volunteers working in education with disadvantaged groups of adults in Italy, Lithuania, Portugal and Spain - experienced the methodology of movies applied to adult education for empowerment and for the development of soft skills.

After having attended a theorical introduction about the method and a presentation on the methodological guidelines, delivered by the hosting partner Şişli Teknik ve Endüstri Meslek Lisesi, the participants were divided in two groups and had the opportunity to create a short movie for education, from the elaboration of an idea and a scenario, to shooting the movie. Time to play around with was not so much, but at the end two short movies were produced.They are not professional, on the technical point of view, because everything (acting, directing, shooting, editing) has been done by the participants, who are educators in sectors other than filming.

Here is the first one: Hammam is glue for friendship.

Topic: the difference among languages is not a barrier if persons have good attitude towards each other, have a will to understand other people and try to use other channels to communicate.

Synopsis: tourists from Lithuania, Italy, Spain and Portugal are in Istanbul and want to go to Galatasary Hamam. They don't speak English and ask information to a Turkish person, who is not willing to help. Second scenario: same situation but with different attitude by the Turkish person.